I had not always liked boys, though. When I was young, still a child, as I had told Thomas, I had loved a girl. But I hadn’t told Thomas everything. Like Tristan and Isolde, it had begun on a boat. A few months before, in Kiel, my mother had met a Frenchman named Moreau. My father must have been gone for three years, I think. This Moreau owned a small company in the South of France and was traveling in Germany on business. I don’t know what went on between them, but some time afterward he returned and asked my mother to come live with him. She consented. When she spoke to us about it, she presented the thing to us skillfully, praising the fine weather, the sea, the plentiful food. This latter point was particularly attractive: Germany was just emerging from the great inflation, and even if we were too small to have understood much about it, we had suffered from it. So my sister and I replied: Fine, but what will we do when Papa comes back? “Well, he’ll write to us and we’ll return.”—“Promise?”—“I promise.”
Moreau lived in a large family house, a little old-fashioned and full of hiding places, in Antibes, near the sea. The rich food was soaked in olive oil, and the bright warm April sun, which in Kiel we saw only in July, delighted us right away. Moreau, who, despite his coarseness, was far from being a stupid man, made special efforts to win if not our affection then at least our acceptance. That same summer he rented a large sailboat from an acquaintance and took us on a cruise to the Îles des Lérins and even farther, up to Fréjus. At first I got seasick, but that passed quickly; she—the one I’m talking about—she didn’t get seasick. We settled down together, in the bow of the boat, and we looked at the waves breaking into whitecaps, and then we looked at each other, and through this look, fired by the bitterness of our childhood and the all-consuming roar of the sea, something happened, something irremediable: love, bittersweet, until death. But at the time it was still just a look.
It didn’t stay that way for long. It wasn’t right away but maybe a year later that we discovered those things; then a boundless pleasure filled our childhood. And then one day, as I said, we were caught. There were endless scenes, my mother called me a pig and a degenerate, Moreau cried, and it was the end of all that is beautiful. A few weeks later, when school began, they sent us to Catholic boarding schools, hundreds of kilometers away from each other, and so, vom Himmel durch die Welt zur Hölle, began a nightmare that lasted many years and that, in a way, still continues. Frustrated, bitter priests, informed of my sins, forced me to spend hours on my knees on the ice-cold flagstones of the chapel, and let me take nothing but cold showers. Poor Partenau! I too have known the Church, and worse still. Yet my father was a Protestant, and I already despised the Catholics; under this treatment, the few remnants of my naïve child’s faith disintegrated, and rather than repentance, I learned hatred.
Everything in that school was deformed and perverted. At night, the older boys came and sat down on the edge of my bed and put their hands between my legs until I slapped them; then they laughed, calmly got up, and left; but in the showers, after gym, they slipped up against me and quickly rubbed their things on my rear end. The priests also sometimes invited boys into their offices to hear their confessions, then, with promises of gifts or through intimidation, forced them to commit criminal acts. It was hardly surprising that the unhappy Pierre R. tried to kill himself. I was disgusted, I felt as if I were covered in mud. I didn’t have anyone to appeal to: my father would never have allowed such things, but I had no idea where my father was.